e of France, from feeble, distracted,
miserable Mexico, to which it belonged. These filibusters were
generally the most worthless and desperate vagabonds to be found in all
the Southern States. Many Southern gentlemen of wealth and ability, but
strong advocates of slavery, were in cordial sympathy with this
movement, and aided it with their purses, and in many other ways. It
was thought that if Texas could be wrested from Mexico and annexed to
the United States, it might be divided into several slaveholding
States, and thus check the rapidly increasing preponderance of the free
States of the North.

To join in this enterprise, Crockett now left his home, his wife, his
children. There could be no doubt of the eventual success of the
undertaking. And in that success Crockett saw visions of political
glory opening before him. I determined, he said, "to quit the States
until such time as honest and independent men should again work their
way to the head of the heap. And as I should probably have some idle
time on hand before that state of affairs would be brought about, I
promised to give the Texans a helping hand on the high road to freedom."

He dressed himself in a new deerskin hunting-shirt, put on a foxskin
cap with the tail hanging behind, shouldered his famous rifle, and
cruelly leaving in the dreary cabin his wife and children whom he
cherished with an "ocean of love and affection," set out on foot upon
his perilous adventure. A days' journey through the forest brought him
to the Mississippi River. Here he took a steamer down that majestic
stream to the mouth of the Arkansas River, which rolls its vast flood
from regions then quite unexplored in the far West. The stream was
navigable fourteen hundred miles from its mouth.

Arkansas was then but a Territory, two hundred and forty miles long and
two hundred and twenty-eight broad. The sparsely scattered population
of the Territory amounted to but about thirty thousand. Following up
the windings of the river three hundred miles, one came to a cluster of
a few straggling huts, called Little Rock, which constitutes now the
capital of the State.

Crockett ascended the river in the steamer, and, unencumbered with
baggage, save his rifle, hastened to a tavern which he saw at a little
distance from the shore, around which there was assembled quite a crowd
of men. He had been so accustomed to public triumphs that he supposed
that they had assembled in honor of his arrival